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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance Podcast, my friends. I am Dr. April Darley, and today I wanna talk to you about emotional flashbacks. Why do we have them, and what do we do when they pop up? Great question. So let's dive right in. Now, I don't know about you, but for me, a lot of times these emotional flashbacks, these memories will pop up when I am doing something absolutely benign.
I'm driving my car down the street. I am taking a walk out in nature, and some memory or thought will pop up. Now, why does that happen? I teach my clients that we have three different levels of our consciousness, and let's just go ahead and assign a different brain to that level. And these different brains have different personalities.
You have a logical brain, an emotional brain, and a survival brain. Now, if we were to actually look at the anatomy of your brain, the [00:01:00] hippocampus, which is responsible for memory, is in that emotional brain. You also have the amygdala, which is your fear detector, right beside it.
It's not anatomically correct, but i n my system, the amygdala and your brainstem combine your survival brain because they're both looking out for your best interest and keeping you alive. But for the sake of this conversation, when we're talking about memory, it's the amygdala that's gonna tag a memory with a certain emotion, and it's the hippocampus that's gonna recall that memory.
So when we have these sudden emotional flashbacks, it's not an accident. It's not a random fluke of your brain. There is something in your environment, either internal or external, that has triggered the hippocampus and amygdala to fire up a well worn neuroplastic pathway and [00:02:00] open up that memory as if it were a video or Word document.
And this is how your brain works. When you open up that file, your brain will replay the last saved version of that file. Now, if you do any kind of mind body work or you become a client of mine, or you do any sort of somatic work, it is possible t o edit the file and take the emotional tagging or the emotional charge off a particular memory.
So sometimes you can remove the trigger. For example, if you have alcohol dependency, you take the alcohol out of your house and you don't hang out in bars, or you don't go to parties, maybe where alcohol is served. For some people, that's what they need. And some situations you can do that. You can remove the trigger, but not always.
So then you go to the next best thing, which is to remove your [00:03:00] response to the trigger. And for example, if you're not able to remove alcohol as a trigger, you change the way you think, feel, and operate in any of those habits. So even if you're in the presence of alcohol, you don't drink it. And that is what I offer my clients in the Bespoke Brain System is we're going to either change the trigger or change your reaction to the trigger.
Either one will edit the memory so that when you pull it back up, you're not experiencing the same thing that you did when it originally occurred. So why do we get these memory flashbacks? Again, it's the trigger. Something that we saw, that we smelled, that we thought, that we heard, that went beyond the realm of our logical or conscious brain.
Now, your brain is a huge filtering machine. Your subconscious processes [00:04:00] at around 12 times the speed that your conscious brain does, and you get so much stimulus in the form of sight, sound, smell that the brain has to filter out about 99% of it because you logically cannot n egotiate that much data. It's like you cannot see it or hold it or even react to it.
Your brain is used to working so fast and filtering out a lot. So the trigger is often something that you're completely unaware of, and I'm gonna tell you a secret. A lot of times it's something that you think, but you're not consciously aware of the thought it was very fleeting, or it was something that you felt in relation to an entirely different topic, that the emotional chemical signature of that emotion was so similar to a traumatic or unpleasant event that your brain just went ahead and opened up [00:05:00] that file. And that emotional brain, that hippocampus has no concept of time, it doesn't know that you're not currently in that situation anymore.
And that is why people can get stuck in trauma loops or thought emotion loops because a thought can generate an emotion and emotion can have a feedback response and generate a thought. And the more you feed thoughts that elicit certain emotions and vice versa. The more these loops continue and you can get stuck in a thought emotion loop for minutes, hours, days, or even weeks. That is not what you want.
What do we do? We have to break the loop, and that is easier for some people than others. There are tips and tricks and techniques that you can do to break the loop, but [00:06:00] awareness that the loop is happening is one of the fastest ways to break it. Number two is to consciously not feed thoughts that create painful emotions.
This is where distraction or diversion or even positive self-talk will end a thought loop, and there is a difference in your brain between rumination, which is getting stuck in these painful thought loops and reflection, which is being able to examine the memory with a growth mindset. The circuitry is very similar, but it's slightly different sides of the brain that do rumination versus reflection.
And right now, if you're listening to this and you tend to be a ruminator. It's because you've practiced that pathway more often. It doesn't mean that you can't flip the switch, use the other side of the brain and get into reflection and make [00:07:00] it about curiosity instead of pain. This is something that I also teach my clients how to do in my Bespoke Brain System. Sometimes these memories are triggered because you're doing very well for yourself. You are learning how to rewire your nervous system and get into a new way of thinking, feeling, believing that's more about safety instead of chaos.
That makes your brain panic because it is a new pathway that you are creating and the brain doesn't like it. So sometimes these flashbacks will occur because your brain is trying to push you back onto the old pathway, the old habits, the old you. And is a great big fat saboteur. This is why it's so important to have this awareness and these tools in your toolbox so that you can catch on to the brain's dirty little tricks and don't let it derail your [00:08:00] progress.
And not to view these flashbacks as a failure. It's actually a sign of improvement and a sign of success if you are actively working towards change. It's just a sign to practice your preferred tools, your preferred habits, your preferred identity more often than you revert back to the old. So learning how to stop those emotional flashbacks.
Stop those thought emotion loops. Learning what your triggers are if you can, and either avoid them or do techniques like my Bespoke Brain System, which actually extinguishes the emotional response to your triggers. It's like editing the memory. Editing the file so that you're taking off the pain part, and the memory will still exist, but you won't call it up to hurt yourself anymore.
If you do by [00:09:00] chance, stumble on that brain pathway that calls it back up, it's just another memory instead of a memory that haunts you and hurts you. If you would like to learn how to do that for yourself, and you absolutely can, it just takes a new way of thinking and some new tools in your toolbox.
Then schedule a consultation with me at aprildarley.com and I will talk to you about the different ways that I use to build this emotional resilience, to build these new neuroplastic pathways in your brain that you can do that will shift you away from thought loops and rumination and teach you how to use the side of your brain that is all about reflection and growth.
All right. I will see you next week, my friends, and you can do anything if you want to. I look forward to hearing from you. Bye-bye.
